Many business owners let their personal communication preferences – rather than their customers’ – drive decisions on which communications channels to provide. But new data from Zipwhip, the first company to text-enable existing business phone numbers, shows that that approach leads to poor customer loyalty and lost revenue. And the problem is common: 75% of consumers say they’ve been unable to get in touch with a business the way they prefer because the business didn’t offer that option, and 96% said that frustrated them.
“At Zipwhip we’ve long believed that customers prefer to text, and the research is bearing that out. But more importantly, this survey now shows how that preference for texting impacts your customer relationships and revenue”
One of the most preferred methods of communication is texting – 80% of respondents said it’s important to them that businesses offer the ability to text. As we’ve seen in separate Zipwhip surveys, having a texting conversation with a business isn’t a foreign concept anymore to consumers; 61% say they’ve had one.
The data shows that if businesses don’t offer someone’s preferred communication channel, rather than accommodate the business and use the channels they do provide, customers will simply go elsewhere. Nearly half (48%) will go to a competitor, a third (33%) have unsubscribed from a business’s communications and almost 20% said they’ve left a negative review.
“At Zipwhip we’ve long believed that customers prefer to text, and the research is bearing that out. But more importantly, this survey now shows how that preference for texting impacts your customer relationships and revenue,” said John Lauer, CEO of Zipwhip. “It’s easy to enable texting and let your customers drive the interaction, and this data proves it’ll help in the long run.”
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